Author: joseph

A new book is in the works, for release in 2009: Radiohead and Philosophy. I’ll be writing a chapter, as previewed here.

The band’s relationship to money has been on everyone’s mind, including those who thought the “pay what you want, no really” distribution method “demeans music.” But money as a problem, as something that corrupts, has been on Thom Yorke’s mind since at least 1998’s Meeting People Is Easy:

It’s like a supply and demand thing. It’s like: ‘Well, this is what they want me to do, you know, this is what they want to hear, so I’ll do more of this. Because this is great and they love me’, and that can be the demise of so many recording artists. You know, because you suddenly, suddenly people start giving you cash as well, suddenly you’ve got money and you get used to this lifestyle and you don’t want to take any risks because they’ve got you by the balls. You don’t want to take any risks because like, why, you know you’ve got all this baggage you’re carrying around with you everywhere. And you can’t let go. You know you’ve got all these things you’ve bought or you’re attached to, or, you know, if you start spending all this money.
That’s how they get you.

Just after this interview with a slightly clueless Australian journalist, shots of Radiohead in the studio attempting to record new tracks are revealing but boring, and boring because Radiohead is bored. The last song we see performed live before the credits role is an early version of “Nude,” a song then untitled. Gee shows us Yorke joking with an MTV reporter that he’d like to call the song, “Your Home Is At Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Repayment,” but he’s not sure if the title’s “catchy enough.” Yorke’s deadpan-dark humor doesn’t spark a giggle in the room, but the risk the title alludes to is exactly the sort of risk Yorke fears losing. As he said, once you’re given money for what you do, you need to keep doing what you do or risk losing what you have. But fearing this sort of risk makes one afraid to take risks, and “that’s how they get you,” that’s how the record companies crack your little soul: that’s how they get you by the balls.

And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 1725 on Saturday 19 April 2008.

Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea:
East or northeast 5 to 7, decreasing 4 or 5 later. Moderate or rough, decreasing slight or moderate. Occasional rain. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.

Audio for Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea Shipping Forecast 4/19/08

Hello.

Pulk-Pull* has reopened. I closed it not long ago after some difficulties that included:

• changing host setups (from a shared hosting environment to a VPS and back again)
• an SQL dump that was larger than the new shared environment could upload (global variables set at max of 8mb when I had 25mb)
• someone hacked into the site’s new WordPress installation before I could finish setting it up (sometime within a 24hr period)
• I moved
• I got a new job
• the new album from Radiohead seemed to defy description or interpretation
• updates had become intermittent and uninteresting
• my ideas of interpretation were changing (stuck between Eco’s notion of over-interpretation and Rilke’s description of criticism as “happy misunderstandings”)
• Bush was still in office
• et cetera, et cetera / fads for whatever

During all this hubbub, I lost several posts. Several meaning 3-5 or more or less, I wasn’t counting. One, I think, is still in electronic format elsewhere.

Why “happy misunderstandings” since 2000? What does the phrase even mean?

With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.

-Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet.

Rilke here gets at what I felt after hearing In Rainbows for the first time. Listening to “15 Step” just after midnight Pacific time. No words I wrote down could capture that moment–and I realized I was trying to capture a moment in words, not explain how the song fit into a larger critique of capitalism and so on and so forth. And if anyone has read the site over the last eight years, you’ll know that side-stepping this “critique of capitalism” was a departure, one I barely knew I was making until it was made. The way Radiohead released this album was on everyone’s mind; how “pay what you want, no really” was going to reshape the dying music industry. But all I could think about was how fucking cool it was of them to start a song with glitchy, electronic, staticy-rhythm that mimicked The Eraser that segued with a shear drop into Phil Selway’s powerful drumming and a Smiths-like guitar layered over a bass-line backed by clapping … a song whose parts would never be greater than its whole, a whole that was both very much a Radiohead song, but also so different that I was laughing outloud while listening to children scream and trying to follow the beat on my friend’s desk and fumbling around for a volume knob. And and and. And Radiohead has … funk? Funk so wide you can’t get around it. This, ladies and gentlemen, was and is: a rock album. And as Alex Ross wrote, how rock-and-roll is it to write about rock-and-roll?

And that’s where I am, where I think some other people are too. I don’t think, anymore, you stop moving in the face of movement. So, I’ve decided, instead of thinking I need to stop, realizing it was the skin I’d put me in and I don’t need to wait for someone’s hand up my ass to move my mouth.

Blink: 1 for yes, 2 for no.

A line from “Nude,” the third song on Radiohead’s In Rainbows, guides this essay: “Don’t get any big ideas.” Readers are asked to set aside the Karl Marx they know from The Communist Manifesto, from the history of Communism or Marxism. Marx himself would ask this of us: hearing that a group was calling themselves Marxist he said, “I at least am not a Marxist.” Admittedly, approaching Marx without preconceptions is difficult or impossible—approaching a “Nude” Marx is maybe, as the Radiohead song says,”not going to happen.” Yet, this may be the best way into his difficult, dense philosophy for beginning and advanced readers alike. That said, to begin, Marx’s philosophy could be summed up by a sentence that pre-dates the multi-volume monument known as Capital: “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.” This sentence captures what later writers have dubbed “dialectical materialism,” the name later given to Marx’s philosophy. But a name isn’t needed to understand the core of Marx’s position: people exist in tension between what they make of the world and what the world makes of them.

Radiohead’s music, art and career plays out this tension—sometimes the world wins, sometimes Radiohead wins. Right now, arguably, with the successful digital self-distribution of their latest album, Radiohead is winning. And I don’t use the word “winning” lightly. Make no mistake: Marx saw this tension as a struggle, one to be won or lost, for better or worse. It is this notion of struggle that I trace in the real-world struggle of Radiohead as it’s voiced in songs (”Dollars & Cents,” the song from Amensiac this essay takes its title from), artwork (the anti-advertising of Hail to the Thief’s cover art), and the band’s record-industry relations, and lately happy lack thereof.

Since at least 1997 Radiohead has lived uncomfortably with the record industry’s control over their music and lives. That the “dollars & cents / & the pounds & the pence / the mark & the yen” were cracking Radiohead’s soul, is painfully clear in Grant Gee’s 1997 documentary Meeting People is Easy. Yorke explains in an interview at the close of the OK Computer tour how record-industry economics strip a musician of the ability to take risks, to experiment musically: once “people start to give you cash” Yorke explains, and “that’s how they get you.” As Gee’s documentary ends, we watch Radiohead disintegrating, yet amid this disintegration emerges “Nude,” a song that survived the soul-cracking we watch during Meeting People Is Easy, a song that appears, ten years later, on In Rainbows. This move from the palpable disaffection that permeates Meeting People Is Easy to the effortless, straight-forward and human-made sounds of In Rainbows isn’t obvious, but Marx’s philosophy helps us make sense of it—how history has made Radiohead and how Radiohead is making history.

The lyrics and music for “15 Step” are arguable the perfect opener for In Rainbows.

How come I end up where I started?
How come I end up where I was?
Won’t take my eyes of the ball again.
You reel me out and then you cut the string.

How come I end up where I started?
How come I end where I was?
Won’t take my eyes of the ball again.
First you reel me out and then you cut the string.

You used to be all right.
What happened?
Did the cat get your tongue?
Did your string come undone?

One by one. One by one.
It comes to us all.
It’s as soft as your pillow.

You used to be all right. What happened?
Et cetera, et cetera.
Fads for whatever.
15 steps then a sheer drop.

How come I end up where I started?
How come I end up where I went wrong?
Won’t take my eyes of the ball again.
You reel me out and then
you cut the string.

As Mark Pytlik wrote:

In the end, that which we feared came true: In Rainbows represents the sound of Radiohead coming back to earth. Luckily, as it turns out, that’s nothing to be afraid of at all.

Radiohead asks the question on “15 Step”, “how come we’ve ended up where we started?”, but they ask the question just as they’re pointing us in the other direction, that is, where we think they probably are right now sonically. The song begins with the skittery cascade of beats Yorke has been (admittedly) siphoning from Warp Records (and which sound like of some of more difficult b-sides of the The Eraser, like “Iluvya”), but just as those beats gain traction we get pointed in another direction: to Selway’s drums working out nothing less than what I will call a kick-ass beat. Jon Pareles wrote for the NYTimes on Oct 11 that much of the album “comes across as fingers on strings and sticks on drums.” Those sticks on drums is exactly what “15 Steps” gives us, but not after making us look in the opposite direction first. The electronic beats never disappear completely, but layered on top and far in front we get Selway at his best, as well as a “Scatterbrain”/The Smiths-sounding guitar movement (is that Ed or Jonny or both?) that balances with an equally kick-ass bass-line from Colin Greenwood and Yorke’s voice slows down, a slowing down that the song’s start would never anticipate: “Used to be all right. What happened?” The cat, with all certainty, didn’t get Radiohead’s tongue. So, what happened? In Rainbows happened, one of the best albums of any artist of the last ten years made without, to borrow a phrase from Wilco, a company in their back.

Oh: and children yelling and clapping? Radiohead, making music that might be their must mature, turns to children for help. Genius.

Double-quick time: http://www.thebigask.com/index.php?f=1184935525426_89.

“Establish a society in which the individual has to pay for the air he breathes (air meters; imprisonment and rarefied air, in case of non-payment simple asphyxiation if necessary (cut off the air)” (31)

“All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” (140)

Duchamp, Marcel. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marchel Duchamp. Ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

“Those who sit in a glass house do wrong to throw stones about them; besides, the American glass house is rather thin, it will break easily, and the interior is anything but a gainly sight.”

Quote by Emma Goldman. From “The Traffic in Women,” an essay in Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays.